WINDOWS 7 BATTERY USAGE ON LAPTOPS?

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Stevie G

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Hi Guys,

Anyone experiencing problems with battery life on their laptops. I have personally experienced it. Ran Win 7 Ultimate and Win XP "last XP 22" on my XPS it there is a huge difference. Battery lasted just more then an hour and then shutting down when it gets to 7% usage. I cannot set it to run down my battery fully. So this will obviously influence the lifetime of my battery, since the counter will see that it has not run down properly. With XP though it lasted more then 1h30 and completely run until it switches off. They also say that win 7 damages your battery permanently. i really don't know if this is a fact or a smoke in the air.

Do you guys think its worth to run Win 7 on a laptop or just stick to XP, since you can make XP look exactly like 7. Would you guys sacrifice your laptop battery just for Win 7?

For desktop pc's its ok, but for laptops?

What is your opinion.

Would be interesting to see a vote on this
:D:D:D
 
Stevie G said:
They also say that win 7 damages your battery permanently. i really don't know if this is a fact or a smoke in the air.

Do you guys think its worth to run Win 7 on a laptop or just stick to XP, since you can make XP look exactly like 7. Would you guys sacrifice your laptop battery just for Win 7?
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Who is the "they" you are referring to? While you could make XP look like 7 it simply wouldn't be the same, I'd gladly sacrifice a few minutes of battery life and have 7 over XP.
 
They also says that he once counted to infinity and beyond... Alll I know is he is called .... The Stig!

Seriously... they seem to be talking a lot of nonsense.. My Notebook with Windows 7 will almost give me 4 hours... But then again the Lenovo Power Management is excellent.
 
From the Toms Hardware article quoted

Of course, no review of a netbook platform is complete without a look at battery life, especially if we’re interested in the differences between OS versions. However, we shouldn’t forget that we’re still dealing with a release candidate of Windows 7, which means that both the operating system itself and its drivers are still very much works in progress.
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Stevie G said:
Check on Toms Hardware and you will see that Win 7 does indeed permanently damage and reduce the battery life. That's a fact and not a myth. It has been tested on a laptop with Win 7 and XP SP3 installed on the machine. The tests showed that XP actually outshine Win 7 in most tests and PC Mark scores.

Check this out

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-xp,2339.html

:D:confused::D
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Sorry, but how does the OS, which has nothing to do with the actual charging of the battery permanently damage it? In fact, it never interacts directly with the battery, it only powers up/down other components.
And wow XP uses less battery power. That is expected since it doesnt do half the stuff Win7 does.
 
Archer said:
Sorry, but how does the OS, which has nothing to do with the actual charging of the battery permanently damage it? In fact, it never interacts directly with the battery, it only powers up/down other components.
And wow XP uses less battery power. That is expected since it doesnt do half the stuff Win7 does.
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Dude, do you even use all the features of 7. The OS makes a huge difference as it uses a lot of resources, i.e. programs and other stuff running in the background that you don't normally see.
 
Stevie G said:
Dude, do you even use all the features of 7. The OS makes a huge difference as it uses a lot of resources, i.e. programs and other stuff running in the background that you don't normally see.
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If you read my post you would see that I agree with that, Win7 uses more power than XP. What I am disagreeing with is your claim that the OS can do damage to the battery. The OS cant do this since it does not have any direct interaction with the battery, the OS only interacts with the components that draw power from the battery.
 
Well the OS controls power management and it does interact with the battery.
 
I get just about an hour, but thats normal for my Laptop.
 
I get about 6 hours on W7 Home Premium on my netbook, maybe half an hour less than I got with XP, but that doesn't bother me.

And I'm sure that it's just settings, I could probably sort it out if I tried.
 
Madman88 said:
I get just about an hour, but thats normal for my Laptop.
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Just remember that the OS is basically your body and your cpu the brain. So when the cpu gives commands then the body responds to its demands. So the more commands it gives the more power or energy will be used. So if the body is drained so will your battery drain too. But if you have a proper power manengement system build into Win 7 then the power usage can be controlled on how much power must be prioritised. That seems to be the problem with Win 7. It gives you basically "uncapped" usage on whatever command is given. I'm pretty sure there must be a power management program out there where you can control how much power should be given to certain resources.

Hope i make sense
:D
 
Read my posts, the OS does not interact directly with the battery, hence the OS cant damage the battery. It tells every other component what to do with regards to power usage, but not the battery itself.
 
Archer said:
Read my posts, the OS does not interact directly with the battery, hence the OS cant damage the battery. It tells every other component what to do with regards to power usage, but not the battery itself.
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Yes i know that, but the OS is the platform with all the features buit-in which draines your battery.
 
Have you tried disabling Aero (new feature since Vista. like to use the GPU and CPU to make things pretty) when you are on battery power? I use a program called Aerofoil to disable the Aero and switch to the "Power Saving" power profile (http://www.silentsoftware.co.uk/) which helps
 
From the link above...

"It should stand to reason that some customers would be surprised to see this warning after upgrading a PC that was previously operating fine," writes Sinofsky. "Essentially the battery was degrading but it was not evident to the customer until Windows 7 made this information available. We recognize that this has the appearance of Windows 7 'causing' the change in performance, but in reality all Windows 7 did was report what was already the case."
Click to expand...
 
i run widows 7 on my pc and laptop which was xp but for networking n streaming i upgraded my laptop to 7 ultimate and run it on powersaving mode, basic desktop and aero and unnecessary resources disabled and it actually runs faster than xp. battery life reduced by 20 min from 3 hours on normal usage.
 
Jola said:
I get about 6 hours on W7 Home Premium on my netbook, maybe half an hour less than I got with XP, but that doesn't bother me.

And I'm sure that it's just settings, I could probably sort it out if I tried.
Click to expand...

What is the brand of your laptop?
 
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